The First Modern Japanese

The Life of Ishikawa Takuboku

Donald Keene

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231542234
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Many books in Japanese have been devoted to the poet and critic Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912). Although he died at the age of twenty-six and wrote many of his best-known poems in the space of a few years, his name is familiar to every literate Japanese. Takuboku's early death added to the sad romance of the unhappy poet, but there has been no satisfactory biography of his life or career, even in Japanese, and only a small part of his writings have been translated. His mature poetry was based on the work of no predecessor, and he left no disciples. Takuboku stands unique.

Takuboku's most popular poems, especially those with a humorous overlay, are often read and memorized, but his diaries and letters, though less familiar, contain rich and vivid glimpses of the poet's thoughts and experiences. They reflect the outlook of an unconstrained man who at times behaved in a startling or even shocking manner. Despite his misdemeanors, Takuboku is regarded as a national poet, all but a saint to his admirers, especially in the regions of Japan where he lived. His refusal to conform to the Japan of the time drove him in striking directions and ranked him as the first poet of the new Japan.

1

Takuboku, Modern Poet

Ishikawa Takuboku (1886–1912) probably ranks as the most beloved poet of the tanka, a form of poetry composed by innumerable Japanese poets for well over a thousand years. Takuboku’s tanka stand out less for their beauty than for their individuality; his poems are as surprising today as they were for the first readers. His poems borrowed from no one but managed always to transmit the striking freshness of his thoughts and experiences. Countless poets before him had conveyed in the thirty-one syllables of the tanka such subjects as their perceptions of the changes brought by the seasons or the yearning evoked by the poet’s love. Takuboku’s poems seldom touched on these familiar subjects, but he had no intention of destroying the traditions of the tanka with his originality. Instead, he clung to composing his poems in thirty-one syllables, just as other tanka poets had done for two thousand years. And although his essays often urge poets to write in the language of the day, his tanka were always written in the classical Japanese language, even when he described the thoughts of an unmistakably modern man. He rather resembled the French modernist poets who, though determined to wreck the old poetry, continued to use rhyme and traditional forms like the sonnet.¹

The tanka was often beautiful in its imagery and rich in overtones that gave depth, despite the few syllables available to the poet. The language permitted to the poets consisted of a vocabulary that had been established centuries earlier by members of the court in order to maintain elegance of diction, but it limited the subjects. Tanka poets borrowed openly from the poetry of their predecessors; indeed, a poem without reference to the past was not praised. Tanka poets, with no thought of startling, hoped that their variations on familiar themes would be admired for the delicate shifts of older poems or a barely hinted freshness of expression.

The sameness of subjects in the collections of tanka does not apply to the dozen great tanka poets whose poems are unforgettable, even when the subjects are conventional. Although the rise of linked verse in the fourteenth century and of haiku in the seventeenth century gave poets greater freedom of subject and language, they did not eliminate or greatly change tanka. Not until late in the nineteenth century was there a serious call to reject the heritage of the past and create poetry suitable to men of the enlightened Meiji era.

The poems of Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902), the leader of this new movement, were rarely about the beauty of cherry blossoms or colored autumn leaves and the other lovely but exhausted subjects of poetry. Instead he described in his poems what he had perceived and felt, without worrying whether they might seem unpoetic to readers of traditional poetry. Shiki’s insistence on writing his poems in modern Japanese resulted in bringing tanka and haiku into the new age and saved both forms from being demolished by the European influences that swept over Japanese poets beginning in the 1880s.

This in itself did not make Shiki a modern poet. He rarely revealed, as a modern poet usually does, his deepest emotions, and he seldom referred to himself in the first person. His best-known tanka sequence requires an understanding of unspoken background poems: Shiki did not reveal that he wrote these poems when he was almost completely paralyzed from an illness that eventually killed him.

Unlike Shiki, Takuboku was a truly modern poet. About sixty years ago, Kōsaka Masaaki, a professor of philosophy at Kyoto University, told me he was convinced that Takuboku was the first modern Japanese. This statement lingered in my memory, though at the time I did not know Takuboku’s work well enough to understand what made him “modern.”²

Although it is difficult to name the qualities that make a poet appear modern, Takuboku’s poems make their modernity clear without needing further explanation. Here are a few examples:

ware ni nishi	two friends
tomo no futari yo	just like me:
hitori wa shini	one dead
hitori wa rō wo	one, out of jail
idete ima yamu	now sick^3

Surely no earlier tanka poet ever wrote a poem that included a dead man, a man released from prison, and still another who was sick; and Takuboku resembled all of them:

arano yuku	like a train
kisha no gotoku ni	through the wilderness
kono nayami	every so often
tokidoki ware no	this torment
kokoro wo tōru	travels across my mind^4

This poem likens the torment flashing through Takuboku’s mind to a train that is momentarily visible as it rushes through a wilderness. Surely no one before Takuboku had used such a simile:

hō ni tsutau	never forget
namida no kobosu	that man, tears
ichiaku no	running down his face
suna wo shimeshishi	a handful of sand
hito wo wasurezu	held out to show me.^5

The word “sand” occurs in all of the first ten poems of A Handful of Sand, Takuboku’s most celebrated collection. This poem suggests the passing of time, like sand in an hourglass. Even though Takuboku does not tell us what he felt on seeing the weeping man, he makes us feel almost unbearable sympathy.

Takuboku believed that the tanka was the ideal form for a poem. Disagreeing with the poets of his day who, under European influence, found the tanka’s brevity an obstacle to their expression, he insisted that the shortness allows the poet to write a poem the moment an inspiration comes into his head. The brevity of the tanka keeps the poet from exaggerating his emotions, as there is no second stanza repeating what has already been expressed.

Takuboku sometimes used modern Japanese when he wrote poems that were not tanka, but all his tanka were in the classical language. Although this sometimes makes them difficult to understand, especially today when the classics are no longer an important part of Japanese education, Takuboku did not hesitate to use unusual characters or obsolete meanings. But even when a poem is difficult to parse, the general meaning can usually be sensed.

When we read Takuboku’s poems and diaries today, we are likely to forget that he died a century ago, because even though Japan changed enormously during this time, no gap separates Takuboku from ourselves. We may be startled at times by his candor, especially in his diaries where he reveals even his faults more openly than do most writers today. The following passage from his Romaji Diary (1909) illustrates his modernity: “Why did I decide to keep this diary in roman letters? Why? I love my wife, and it’s precisely because I love her that I don’t want her to read this diary. No, that’s a lie! It’s true that I love her, and it’s true that I don’t want her to read the diary, but the two facts are not necessarily related.”⁶

Although less widely read than his poetry, Takuboku’s diaries are his most unforgettable works. Because they were written day by day and were not rewritten at a later date, they inevitably contain passages of only ephemeral interest, but hardly a page is without literary interest. Takuboku did not hesitate to show himself naked even when his actions were plainly foolish or deplorable. He did not keep the diaries with possible readers in mind, nor was he making a confession. He occasionally did use material from his diaries in his works of fiction, but never long passages or successfully. The diaries must have taken considerable time to write each night, and they were Takuboku’s most precious possession. When he had lost everything else, he saved his diaries. Then, when he realized he might die before long, he ordered a friend to burn them after his death, but he never attempted to burn them himself. He also ordered his wife, Setsuko, to burn his diaries after he died, but fortunately she did not.

When Takuboku died in 1912, he was not well known to the public, but in the years since then, more than a thousand books and monographs have been devoted to his life and writings. He is now recognized as a major figure of modern Japanese literature.

Takuboku was born in the tiny village of Hinoto in Iwate Prefecture. He is usually thought to have been born in 1886, but some scholars, based on a memorandum in Takuboku’s hand and the recollections of an elder sister, insist that he was born in 1885.⁷ His father, Ishikawa Ittei (1850–1927), was the priest of the Sōtō Zen temple in Hinoto, but Takuboku never referred to Hinoto as his birthplac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1. Takuboku, Modern Poet
• 2. Takuboku in Tokyo
• 3. Takuboku the Schoolteacher
• 4. Exile to Hokkaidō
• 5. Hakodate and Sapporo
• 6. Takuboku in Otaru
• 7. A Winter in Kushiro
• 8. Poetry or Prose?
• 9. Takuboku Joins the Asahi
• 10. The Romaji Diary
• 11. The Sorrows of Takuboku and Setsuko
• 12. Failure and Success
• 13. Takuboku on Poetry
• 14. The High Treason Trial
• 15. The Last Days
• 16. Takuboku’s Life After Death
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index